Ding-Dong. Ding-Dong.

The school bell rings to signal the end of class. I hastily pack my school bag and head over to my cubicle to collect my things.

Midway on throwing on my jacket, Yuna sneaks up beside me and decides to jab her fingers into my ribcage. The energetic, red-haired girl was always pestering me whenever she had the chance.

Poke-poke-poke-poke-poke-poke-poke-poke-poke-poooookeee.

“YAAAAAAAAA! SHIN YUNA!”, I slap her arm away from me.

“Ryuuuuuujiiiiiiinnnnnnnnn~! Do you wanna come with Chae and I to the cafe?”, Yuna pleads to me in her overly-sweet tone and her sickenly cute puppy eyes that makes me want to barf my insides out. Chaeryeong, Yuna, and I usually went to hangout at the local cafe to talk and do homework.

“I can’t. I have a shift at the restaurant.”, I curtly respond.

“Ew, gross. You do know it became the lowest rated restaurant in the city, right? The food , like, why are you still working there?”, Yuna whines in her usual bratty princess tone.

“Because no one else will work there and they are desperate to have me. I could literally set the kitchen on fire and they wouldn’t fire me. Plus, the Hwangs are really nice to me.”, I remark.

Admittedly, I needed the cash, too, because that was the only way I could support my two kitties, Byulie and Dallie. They are two abandoned kittens I found one day out by a dumpster on my way home. I adopted them into my house, but my parents refused to have them. They told me I could only have them if I were the one to support them financially.

I remember when they looked up at me with their cute little kitty eyes and at that moment I knew we were meant to be. I have basically become a teen mom because I treat Byulie and Dallie as my literal children.

So, I got a job at some ty restaurant in order to buy my babies the food, toys, and accessories they needed. I don’t regret it at all even if the job is y. Byulie and Dallie are my soul. Yuna calls me a cat-hoarding lesbian, but she just doesn’t get it.

The both of us make it to the front entrance of the school to depart. I unlock my bike from the bike rack and hop on top of it.

“Well, maybe Chae and I will stop by the restaurant later to check up on you.”, Yuna smiles.

“Please do. If not, I will most likely lose the little sanity I have left.”, I start biking away while waving goodbye to Yuna.

________________________________________

Here’s the problem with working at tiest restaurant in the world: no one likes the food.

Sure, there are a few crazies here and there that actually frequent the restaurant and are considered regulars. But, they are also decrepit old men who I don’t even think have working taste buds anymore.

Also, the health inspector came in last week and gave us the letter food grade D. So, our regulars must also be blind, too. We get a few unknowing, naive customers, but they usually never come back or they either start a fight with the staff.

The family restaurant is called “Hwang House”. It’s owned by the Hwang Family, who is actually a very kind family, but they can’t cook. At all.

The family actually owns a dance company and they are mostly all choreographers. The restaurant was owned by a distant great uncle who passed away, so the family was asked to takeover the restaurant to maintain his legacy. I don’t think the uncle would be happy to see how his “legacy” is doing right now.

I walk in through back of the restaurant and put my stuff in my locker and go to change in the staff bathroom. After changing into my black slacks and black polo shirt, I step out and notice Yeji, my co-worker/friend/boss, sitting at an empty table watching dance covers on her phone.

Yeji is the daughter of the Hwangs and she is actually an extremely talented dancer. She competes in all sorts of competitions and wins numerous awards.

I sit down next to her, “Yo.”

Not looking away from her screen she responds, “Hey, Ryujin. The restaurant hasn’t gotten a customer for some hours, so you can take your time getting ready.”

I tie my apron and look over to her, “Did the packages to re-stock the freezer come in yet?”

“I don’t think so. But, you could clean the kitchen if you want something to do.”, Yeji replies to me.

Eventually, Yeji gets behind the counter at the entrance to greet any unlucky customers and I start mopping the kitchen floors.

A lot of time passes with the two of us like this until a couple walks into the restaurant. The couple were still in school uniform resembling the attire of the local private school.

Yeji’s eyes bulge into the size of golf-balls and she immediately turns back to look at me. She doesn’t say anything, but her face says it all.

What the .

We usually never get any new customers and when we do they typically aren’t young students from the rich private school because, well, the obvious.

I totally ignore the boy that walked into the restaurant and my eyes instantly gravitated towards the girl who walked in beside him and, to put it simply, she was drop dead gorgeous.

I felt like everything had frozen and ice crept up on all of my limbs rendering me motionless. Jaw dropped, mop in hand, I couldn’t stop looking at the gorgeous girl who walked in.

She had a small figure, but she looked straight out of the front covers of model magazines at my mom’s hair salon. Her luscious, dark-brown locks cascaded down her shoulders like chocolate waterfalls and her eyes were so captivating that it made me believe they were sparkling.

After a couple more seconds of me shamelessly checking her out, the girl averts her gaze from Yeji to me and locks eyes with me.

Suddenly, the restaurant turned from a frozen wonderland to a steaming sauna. All the ice that encased me before melted and I turned my head away at the speed of light.  I felt my cheeks burning crimson red as I stared down at the ground.

“H-Hi, welcome to Hwang House. Party for two?”, Yeji robotically announces to the couple. The couple nods in response.

Yeji sits them at a table and hurries over to me, “You be the waitress. I’ll cook.”, she whispers to me.

“What?!”, I shout-whisper. “Why do I gotta be the waitress???”

“Because I saw you making eyes at that girl. I’m not oblivious.”, Yeji winks and strips off my apron and pushes me off towards the couple’s table.

As I approach their table I can hear their conversation from the distance, “Jisu, I know you’re hungry, but why exactly do we have to eat here?”, the boy pesters the girl whose name was now revealed to me as Jisu.

She just shrugs as a response.

I take a big gulp and greet the two of them, “U-uh, how may I take your orders?”, I directly look at the guy because I was too nervous to wind my neck in the direction of Jisu.

When the guy first walked in I hadn’t really observed him. He was tall and had broad shoulders indicating he probably did sports. He was also somewhat moderately attractive, but he was nothing compared to me, of course. Instead of intertwining his fingers with Jisu’s, he wrapped his hand around Jisu’s wrist. I couldn’t really see how that was romantic in any way and if anything I thought it was just weirdly possessive.

The guy scans the menu and points at what he would like to order, “I’d like this.”

I nod and mustering all the cowardly courage I had left stored in my body I turned to Jisu and plastered on a big smile that probably made me look like a manic serial killer and asked, “And what about you--”,

“She’ll have this.”, the guy rudely cuts me off.

The guy was not just weirdly possessive, rude, but also apparently a control freak, too? Jisu hadn’t even said anything to the guy about what she wanted to order, but he just seem to make her decision on his own. The nerves and tension I felt inside of me because of the gorgeous, dark-haired girl got chipped away because of the aggravation the boy was fueling within me.

“Oh?”, I turn to Jisu once again with a more natural smile on my face and ask her, “Are you sure that is what you will be having, miss?”

Jisu returns a half smile and nods. The guy shoots me a dirty look for trying to ask Jisu again what she wanted, but I could care less.

I took down their orders, grabbed the menus, and strolled to the kitchen. Yeji was sitting on a stool in the kitchen watching dance covers again, unsurprisingly. She saw me walk over and she looked up, “So, what did they order?” I hand her over the paper with their orders scrawled on it.

“You don’t look happy? I thought talking to Miss Perfection over there would’ve sent you to the moon.”, Yeji remarks after she detects my sour demeanor.

“No, because it seems like Miss Perfection over there is taken by Mister .”, the words crudely burst out of my mouth.

“The first customers of our shift and you are already gonna get in a fight?”, Yeji sighs. “Still don’t get how mom hired such a short-tempered dork.”, she flicks my forehead. “Just try to survive against Mister , we will probably just get one of the regulars after this and we can just close up.”, Yeji comforts me right after.

Yeji scans the order, goes to the freezer, picks out miscellaneous meats, and tosses them into the microwave. Our stove and oven has been broken for a month due to gas issues, so Yeji and I have just been microwaving everything on menu. It tastes like complete , but the restaurant’s income mostly depends on our tastebud-less old men customers and they hardly notice the difference. However, as Yeji and I look down at the depressing, soggy dishes of meat we both know these dishes are not going to fly with the couple outside.

“Yeji, you serve it to them.”, I the plates at her.

“What?! No, you do it! You are the waitress today.”, Yeji s the plates back.

“No, you do it.”, I the plates back again.

“No, you.”, she s back.

“I”M NOT SERVING THIS MICROWAVED MONSTROSITY TO THEM.”, I the plates back to her.

“If you do it then I’ll buy you the matching Santa Claus costumes you wanted to buy for Byulie and Dallie.”, Yeji begs.

After picturing Byulie and Dallie in their cute Santa costumes and the polaroids we could take together on Christmas, I realized what I had to do. It was time to serve the soggy, watery meat. I grip the plates from Yeji’s hands and I took a deep breath. Yeji looks into my eyes and asserts, “No matter how much they complain and insult you, don’t lose your cool.”, she squeezes my shoulders and hisses, “Stay calm!”

I speed-walk over to their table and hastenly drop the plates to them. I try to turn and walk away as quickly as I can, but the guy stops me in the middle of my tracks by yelling out, “Hey! What kind of do you think you are pulling here!”

.

Although, I always used to say I hated senseless old men more than anything, right now I wish we had one of our idiotic grandpa customers dining here instead of Jisu and her boyfriend. Old grandpa customers has now officially debuted at #1 on “Ryujin’s Most Liked People List”.

I slowly pivot my body towards their table and I swear I could feel the joints in my knees creak like rusty iron. “Uhm… Is  something wrong, sir?”, I ask.

“What the is this sad piece of you just served us.”, he wiggles his soggy meat and tosses it on the floor. As consequence, the floor gets all dirty from the meat juice.

Yeji told me to stay calm. So what if I just mopped the floors half an hour ago? I will just have to do it again, it’s totally fine.

Gathering all the control I had within me I mustered out smoothly, “Would you like a refund?”

“, I should get more than a refund for this. You should give me extra money”, he yells at me.

“I can only provide a refund, sir.”, I say begrudgingly. I can feel my temper creep up within me like hot lava slowly pouring over the top of a volcano.

“Why do you even work in a hole like this?”, he continues to shout at me.

“I have to cover expenses for two abandoned kittens I recently adopted, sir.”

“For this sad you served me, I hope your cats ing get sick and die. Go find another place to work at, crazy cat .”, he spits out.

Explosion, boom. The lava that was pouring over the volcano has vanished and everything turned into a sea of angry volcanic ash. I know the food is terrible, I know they deserve a refund, but no one, I mean no one, tells my Byulie and Dallie to die. All the anger that was kept within me bursts out and I could feel the fire igniting in my eyes.

“LISTEN HERE YOU CONNIVING SON OF A !”, I scream to the top of the lungs.

I get closer to his face and continue, “I KNOW THE FOOD IS BAD, BUT NEVER TALK BAD ABOUT MY CATS AGAIN BECAUSE THAT IS PLAIN DISRESPECTFUL!”

Spotting the cup of water on the table, I grab it in a fury and dump it on top of him. Everything and everyone in the restaurant was paused. Yeji was hiding behind the counter peering out with her eyes in total disbelief. But, Yeji kinda saw it coming when the dude decided to come for Ryujin’s precious cats.

The boyfriend was also in total disbelief and couldn’t remove his dumbfounded look on his face, which brought me a little more joy than I would like to admit.

The most shocking of all reactions had to be Jisu’s. I had expected the girl to be fairly upset since I just dumped water and cussed out her boyfriend, but the expression on her face was the complete opposite of anything I would have possibly expected.

She had a small little smile plastered on her face and you could clearly tell she was trying to hold back a chuckle in front of him. When Jisu thought her boyfriend wasn’t looking, with the little smile still stuck on her face, she moved her gaze towards me.

She was just sitting there staring up at me amusedly, but for some reason I felt like the end of world hunger was being announced. All the rage previously residing in my body steadily drifted away. I forgot what I was so pissed off about in the first place. Everything just felt so fluttery and tingly.

The boyfriend abruptly gets up from his seat and yelps, “That’s it. Jisu, let’s go, we are leaving this awful establishment.”

Jisu nods disappointingly like how a child would after their mom announces their playdate is over, and responds to him, “Okay, coming...”

I realized that was the first time I actually heard her speak tonight. Her voice reminded me of  sweet honey you buy at convenience stores. It oozes all around you and sticks on you, leaving an unforgettable impression. I thought about how I could listen to Jisu talk all day. I never have tried honey before; despite that, I felt like it was my new addiction

I watched the two walk out the restaurant and Yeji wrapped her arm around my shoulder and whistled out, “Wheeeeeeeew. Let’s not tell mom about this one, shall we?”, Yeji chuckles.

Yeji continued to chuckle and talk about what an the guy was, but I felt slight sadness entering me because I didn’t think I’d ever see the girl named Jisu ever again. Persisting in the back of my mind, however, was that small sliver of hope that I would see the pretty dark-haired girl again.